Markers-Remembering Where God Has Met Us.
On my first mission trip, I drove over a rickety wooden bridge into the poorest part of a Cambodian city. The water below was a highlighter-green blend of sewage and rubbish, and the smell was more fumes than odor. It was a place I did not want to be, let alone stop.
I got out anyway, and the first thing I saw was a boy playing soccer with his mates. Their ball was twine, leaves, sticks, and a plastic bag, almost certainly fished out of that river, and they were grinning ear to ear. Afterward I sat with the boy’s family outside the dwelling they were proud of, and they asked me a question I have carried with me each day: “Will you help the poor people of our city?”
I have forgotten a thousand things about that trip. I have not forgotten that.
It is a marker.
Stones in the middle of the river
When Israel finally crossed the Jordan, God did something that looks, on paper, inefficient. The nation is on the far bank after forty years of waiting, with a land in front of them. And God stops the whole enterprise so twelve men can walk back into the riverbed and haul out twelve stones (Joshua 4).
His reason is plain: “In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them.” The stones were not for God’s benefit. God does not forget. They were for people who would one day stand on dry, ordinary ground and quietly wonder whether the God who parted a river was still with them.
Samuel does the same after a battle he had no business winning. He sets up a stone and names it Ebenezer — “Thus far the LORD has helped us” (1 Samuel 7:12). Not “from here it gets easier.” Just: to this point, He has helped.
Micah makes it a command. God calls His people into court, and His opening charge is not that they have sinned spectacularly but that they have forgotten: “Remember the righteous acts of the LORD” (Micah 6:5). In Scripture, forgetting is not a lapse of memory. It is a spiritual condition.
A marker records where God met you, not where you succeeded. On some fields, that distinction is everything. No one needs markers more than a missionary, because nothing erodes memory faster than the field. In that soil, your memory of God’s faithfulness will not survive on its own. It has to be built.
A couple I know of served ten years in a sensitive, Muslim-majority region: 800,000 people in their target group, two workers on the ground, thirty baptisms, repeated harassment from government authorities. On a spreadsheet, a low-impact field. Their largest supporting church cut them off with ten weeks’ notice.
If your markers are only baptisms, some years you will have nothing to add to the pile. But God met you in those years. He held your marriage together. He gave you the language. He opened a neighbor’s door. He carried you through a season when nothing visible happened. Write those down. You cannot control who responds to the gospel. You can control whether you remember who has been walking beside you.
Building your own pile of stones
Keep it written and dated. Memory edits itself; a notebook does not. Record what God did, not how you felt about it.
Keep it specific. “God is good” is absolutely true, but it will not hold you at two in the morning. “March 4 — Fatima asked me to pray for her mother” will.
Make it physical. A jar of stones, a wall of photographs, a page in your Bible. Something your children can point at and ask about, which is the entire point of Joshua 4.
Say them out loud — with your team, at your table, with your kids. Markers left unspoken are markers lost.
Send them home. This is not self-promotion; it is stewardship. When missionaries go quiet, they become out of sight and out of mind, and the vacuum fills with assumption. Your markers belong to the people praying for you, too.
Thus far
That question in Cambodia has outlasted several of my strategies and every one of my discouragements. That is what a marker does. It does not make the present field easier. It makes it survivable, because it testifies that the God who seems silent this month is the same God who was unmistakable that day.
You will not always feel Him. So build the stones now, while you can still see clearly. On the day the language will not come, the support wobbles, and the church back home has gone quiet, you will need something to walk over to, put your hand on, and say: thus far the LORD has helped us.
